This Saturday, September 6, 2014 at 7PM at Chicago's Constellation, Marilyn Nonken will present an intense exploration of the piano's many sonic identities. In addition to three of my works, the program will include pieces by Paul Clift, Joshua Fineberg, Gerard Pesson, Dominique Troncin, and Claude Vivier. Tickets are only $10 and can be purchased online at Ticketfly.com or at the door.

Below is the complete program as well as a brief interview with Marilyn. Her historical, philosophical, and technical insights provide an engaging preview of Saturday night's concert. Hope to see you there!

Program:

Dominique Troncin: Ciel ouvert

Gerard Pesson: La Lumière n'a pas de bras pour nous porter

Joshua Fineberg: Grisaille

Drew Baker: Asa Nisi Masa

INTERMISSION

Drew Baker: National Anthem

Paul Clift: Action painting -- dark blue, green

Drew Baker: Gray

Claude Vivier: Shiraz

DB: In your book, The Spectral Piano, you talk about “the spectral attitude” and define it as “an approach to music composition and performance supported by four related preoccupations: timbre (tone color), process (transformation), time (temporality), and perception.” While the program you will play in Chicago is not exclusively comprised of spectral composers, these preoccupations seem nonetheless applicable. Is this spectral attitude an appropriate filter through which to view the concert?

MN: I think it's a great way to listen to these pieces—it does provide that through line, and those four preoccupations are affinities all of these composers share.

Of course, many of the pieces on the program are directly connected with the spectral composers. Paul Clift's piece doesn't "sound" spectral, in terms of its use of the instrument, but he worked George Benjamin and Tristan Murail, and he shares their sensitivities to color and process. Troncin and Fineberg both worked with Murail, and in their pieces we hear something really tied to the spectral tradition: a fascination with resonances and building resonances in ways only the piano can, through use of highly specific kinds of articulations and pedaling. It's all very tactile, physical, sensual music. There is a drama to the sound that supersedes any kind of typical narrative or traditional musical form.

One thing to keep in mind is that the spectral composers' interest in timbre and color was closely tied to developments in computer and electronic music, and many of these composers were also taught by Ivo Malec at the Paris Conservatoire, who was a kind of disciple of Pierre Schaeffer. Many share an interest in electronic music, and have been influenced by those revolutions in how we hear and make sound, which have taken place in the past thirty years. Pesson's piece, which hardly uses pitched elements, still explores a continuum of tone colors, resulting from barely attacked tones on the keyboard to the various sounds of skin and nail on the keyboard, and the attack of the foot on the pedal as well. So there is this extraordinary attention to the sound itself, as the basis of the drama of the work.

In your own pieces, too, there is this fascination with transforming harmonies and layered resonances. I always think of your work as being intimately connected to Feldman, and although he wasn't in any way a "spectral" composer, he had that affinity for sound. Feldman also studied piano with a student of Scriabin, whom I consider a primary proto-spectralist.

DB: You will open the program with Ciel overt by Dominique Troncin (1961-1994), a composer whose works are seldom performed in the United States. When did you first discover this piece and how would you compare Troncin's treatment of the piano to that of his teacher, Tristan Murail?

MN: I’m not sure when I first heard his music, but before performing this piece for the first time last spring, I had wanted to learn it for years. I'm sure I heard it from Dominique My's recording. Troncin died of AIDS in 1994, only 33 years old, but he was an inspiring teacher and composer. I've come across so many composers and performers who crossed his path, who describe a wonderfully generous and inventive man. There's a fabulous CD of works written in his memory by the major composers of the time, many his colleagues in Paris, and both the Pesson work (La Lumière n'a pas de bras pour nous porter) and Joshua Fineberg's Til Human Voices Wake Us (a work I also play, but not on Saturday's program) were written in his memory.

Troncin's piece resembles Murail's music, but is also highly individual. There are great swaths that Murail would never have written! Texturally it is very much his own, and dramatically it is sometimes very weird. Troncin's piece doesn't have the same "organic" feel as many spectral works, which can be intensely-process-driven. He is able to find these moments of rupture, that are very shocking, particularly because the piece begins in such a beautiful, delicate fashion.

DB: The sheer physicality of Vivier’s Shiraz stands out as a unique challenge. Yet it seems that this program requires an impressive technical range that goes beyond the more obvious virtuosic demands. What are some of the technical concerns you've encountered in preparing this concert?

MN:Shiraz is certainly one of the hardest pieces physically in the repertoire, in terms of sheer stamina and power. Vivier requires that the pianist play extremely athletically, for what seem like impossibly long passages, and then immediately afterwards play graceful passagework with sensitivity and delicacy. One needs to play with certain abandon, but retain the control or reserve to bring nuance to the material as well. In Pesson's piece, of course, there is a different kind of control and skill required—no actual "notes" are played, so the pianist needs to recalibrate her relation to the keyboard. Many, many levels of articulation and dynamic are required—but the keys must never hit the key bed.

There is a fantastic center-section in Joshua Fineberg's piece which borders on the difficulty of the "new complexity," and perhaps transcends it: requiring that the pianist play polyphonically, physically being almost phantom-like, in two or four or six places at once. I really enjoy practicing this material, and ultimately I think the pianist is able to create a compelling illusion of what's on the page. As a pianist, I think that "compelling illusion" is often what I'm after.

Technically, I am always interested in the variety of color and nuance, and this is always directly tied to the instrument and space in the live performance. So in all the pieces, traditionally "virtuosic" or not, a real challenge to me is developing these conceptions of each piece and its individual sound world, and then creating these sound worlds Saturday night on a new instrument (to me), in a new space. So there is a high level of anticipation, uncertainty, and chance involved with each one—that's a big technical concern which I don't really address until the night of the concert itself.

NOTE: Below are YouTube videos featuring some of the pieces that Marilyn will perform on Saturday night. With the exception of National Anthem, all performances below are by other pianists.

In Megan Grace Beugger's Liaison, a dancer is harnessed to a piano via wires that, when pulled, bow the strings inside the instrument. Thus, the physical movements of the dancer generate the sonic result. It is a visually and aurally striking work. Below is a video of Melanie Aceto performing Liaison at this year's June in Buffalo Festival. In addition, I asked Megan a few questions about how the work came together. Her responses reveal a fascinating process informed by multiple collaborations.

D.B. How long did it take to create the apparatus that connects the dancer to the piano? Did you work from a pre-conceived plan or was the process defined more by trial and error?

Megan Grace Beugger

M.G.B. It was quite a long an intense process. From the initial conception, it probably took about 9 months to get a contraption that produced sound which resembled the final apparatus. After, there were a lot of adjustments made along the roughly one year it took to write the piece. I originally just thought of really long piano bows being tied to a dancer. When I tried that, parts of the piano (dampers and the frame bars) actually prevented any sound from occurring. So first, I just designed a simple device that was just a large wood block with a pole, which would be placed on top of the piano and pull the bows away from anything preventing them from resonating. This worked fine, and could be a useful tool for other pieces, which include intricate bowed piano, but it was rather limiting for this piece. It required two hands or body parts to operate one bow, which was off-putting because of the few amount of potential bows we could use, and the mandated scissors motion would get old really fast. From there, we wanted to have a contraption which would retract the strings, and we had to enlist tons of help from everyone we knew that had any sort of experience in designing mechanisms of any sort. We had three guys from the Center for the Arts at UB, who normally work on set design, Tom Tucker, Gary Casarella, and Tom Burke, architect Michael Rogers, and engineer John Roeseler, among others who worked extensively with us to come up with designs, problem solve, and physically build the contraption. It was extremely exciting to have so many people from such diverse fields actively and enthusiastically involved in making my idea for a piece with into a reality. Once the machine was built, we found problems as we began to work on it, which we consulted our friends for advice and help. The solution for one little problem would usually cause a trail of more, so we had to follow it to the end to get a final apparatus that would work.

D.B.To what degree is the gestural vocabulary in Liaison informed by your collaboration with Melanie Aceto?

M.G.B. It was extremely informed by my collaboration. Due to the nature of the piece, there is no possible separation of dance and music, so we had to write the entire thing together. Melanie would record improvisation sessions with the contraption, which was really helpful, and I’d bring pre-composed segments to rehearsals. The success rate of my pre-composed segments was much lower than I’d normally have composing music. Probably about 80-90% wouldn’t even be physically possible, and that is before you start to cut out what is boring, overdone, and ineffective. Melanie was much more likely to come up with gestures that were linear, rounded, gentle, and smooth, while I was much more likely to come up with gestures which were more choppy and harsh. Our collaboration allowed us to work with material that we would have never come up with on our own, which was really challenging but also rewarding. Additionally, our points of view about larger scale issues, such as form, were very different due to the different fields we were involved in, and it was really interesting for me to see how someone outside the music field thinks about the same concepts composers think about.

D.B. Is there a score for Liaison? If so, what does it look like and how did you come up with an appropriate notation?

M.G.B. Not yet, but one is in the works. As a composer, I always have worked in score, but dancers and choreographers use purely videos of performances in lieu of a score (giving an even stronger interpretive role to the first performers of a work). The piece clearly uses motion beyond that of an everyday person, and requires a skilled dancer. I’m sure there are a few musician/ dancers out there that have a relationship to written scores, but they are in the minority. Most dancers are very visual, and prefer that I show them how to do a movement instead of reading about it, and I prefer doing that too (given enough rehearsal time) as I get to really refine the movement and interpretation to fit with my visions for the piece. However, as this piece has consumed the last year and half of my doctoral studies, I’m hoping to create a score in order to include it in my doctoral portfolio, as well as be something that can open up more musicians to the work. The notation will be a mix of pictures depicting a motion and boxed text that describe sections where one specific motion is repeated until it is “maxed out.” Right now, the focus is on creating extremely detailed diagrams, which document the apparatus and its setup so it can be successfully recreated.

D.B. Given the physical setup of the piece, it makes sense that the pitch material is static. How did you decide upon the chosen pitch collection?

M.G.B. That was something that we experimented with and changed a lot as we wrote the piece. A lot of my choices regarding pitch for this piece were more about practicality than anything else. There were many pitch combinations that I was pleased with the sounds, but due to their placement in the piano they created some sort of technical issue (getting stuck, being hard to pull, twisting with other lines, or producing too much friction and snapping). I also wanted to pick a collection with enough timbral variety. After much trial and error we found a collection that worked great physically in the piano, and I was happy with the sound. The pitches are quasi based off the A spectral series, but there are a few pitches in there to throw it off and create dissonance.

D.B. The title of the piece, the striking image of a performer harnessed to a piano, the provocative ending gesture- all of these elements suggest a variety of possible sexual/political themes. Is this piece intended to explore a particular political idea?

M.G.B. Our goal was to create strong imagery, but not specific imagery. I think when you allow an audience member to connect with the piece by creating their own symbolisms, imageries, and meanings; the piece becomes more personal for them. Neither of us is interested in creating a linear story, however we were interested in creating characters. I often think of the piece more as a duo than a solo piece, where the piano/contraption is character too, and I was very interested in exploring the relationship between the piano/contraption and dancer. The dancer is in control of moving the bows that sound the piano strings, but the piano and contraption have more physical weight and mass, therefore the dancer must face the contraption’s resistance while being stuck in a confined space. This raises questions for me, such as what is strength and what/whom holds it.

Mabel Kwan is a pianist of impressive range and artistry. Last Saturday she presented a stunning performance of Georg Friederich Haas' Trois Hommages for one pianist playing two pianos tuned one quarter-tone apart. Having completed this 45-minute virtuoso marathon, Mabel faces yet another imposing test from Haas this Thursday when she plays the accordion part in Dal Niente's performance of In Vain. Simply put, these works present unique and uncompromising physical and mental challenges. With that in mind, I asked Mabel the following:

D.B. I think the first question that comes to mind is very straightforward: How did you practice the Trois Hommages? More specifically, how did you acclimate yourself to the physical challenges that stem from sitting between two pianos arranged in a V-formation?

M.K. The first movement is the most demanding and worrisome from a physical standpoint-- I started out playing a three-minute version of the piece, and gradually upped the duration to fifteen minutes. I had access to a room with two pianos and even though they were both regularly tuned, it was helpful to practice the first hommage on two pianos. I practiced the second and third movements at home with my piano and a keyboard which I programmed a quarter-tone lower. For those two movements it's essential to practice with the different tuning between the two pianos. I had to take a lot of breaks while practicing and often I had to quit sooner than my brain would've liked just because my arms were shaking and I couldn't control in my fingers. It was strange to experience this law of diminishing returns to such a degree in practicing this piece.

D.B. Aside from a possible dress rehearsal, did you have a chance to practice on pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart?

M.K. The pianos in the hall were tuned two days before the concert so I got to practice for real those two days which was fantastic. I had to figure out some pedaling issues which I hadn't dealt with when practicing at home with the piano and keyboard setup, and another thing I had to get used to was the different timbres between the two pianos.

D.B. Can you describe the on-stage experience of performing all three Hommages?

M.K. It was unexpectedly scary. I've never been so aware of the possibility of mechanical failure. So I was pretty much worried about that the whole time while playing. I didn't know that was going to happen until I was up there. It was kind of awful! But I would totally do it again.

D.B. You are in the very unique position of performing the Trois Hommages and the accordion part for In Vain within the same week. In the case of the latter, you are once again in foreign territory from a physical standpoint, this time as a pianist playing a related but nonetheless very different instrument. How have you approached the challenge of the In Vain accordion part?

M.K. First I really want say, EVERYONE PLEASE COME TO THIS CONCERT. IT WILL BE INCREDIBLE!

This is another case where I had to gradually build up the physicality in order to play a piece. Learning the part at first was very unnatural because the only way I could learn it was to play it on the piano and then "translate" it to the accordion. It was kind of maddening, but as I got more accustomed to playing the accordion and I stopped having to doing that. It's been fascinating to play this part on chromatic accordion because the intervals--lots of tritones, whole steps, half steps--are perfectly suited to the arrangement of the buttons on the accordion-- three rows, each a diminished 7 chord. While I can't recommend a piece by Haas being the first thing you learn on a new instrument, it's been an interesting way to get to know the accordion very well.

D.B. Do you have any plans to perform the Trois Hommages again? Are there any other pieces on your agenda that place similar demands on the pianist?

M.K. I would love to play the Trois Hommages again. I'm also interested in your piano solo, Stress Position, and a piece for three toy pianos by Evan Johnson, Positioning in Radiography.

Note: I very much appreciate Mabel taking time to answer my questions and it would certainly be an honor to have her perform Stress Position. After playing Haas' Hommage to Ligeti, however, I'm sure my piece will seem rather tame!

On Sunday, December 16, 2012, the (Un)familiar Music Series will present (Re)new Amsterdam, a fundraiser benefiting New Amsterdam Records. The Brooklyn-based label sustained significant damage to their warehouse and lost around 70% of their CD inventory during Super Storm Sandy.

It is a pleasure to begin this new series of "Listening To" posts with Jenna Lyle, a composer and vocalist from Carrollton, Georgia. Jenna currently resides in Chicago and is pursuing a Doctor of Music in composition at Northwestern University. I recently presented a few questions to Jenna about breathpiece, an intense work for voice, cello and double bass. Her responses provide insight into a compositional process that draws upon extensive investigations into breathing and the impact of breath upon the body, instrumental/vocal techniques, and the resultant sounds. Jenna also talks about important artistic influences including the painter Pierre Soulages and singer-songwriter Tom Waits. A complete recording of breathpiece and the interview are posted below.

DB: How did you come up with this somewhat unusual instrumentation?

JL: The piece was commissioned by my friend, bassist Scott Dixon, in the Spring of 2011. He wanted a piece that we could perform together and gave me the option of writing for bass and soprano or bass, cello, and soprano. Since we live in different cities, I thought it might work best if I wrote a piece whose main elements he could work up with a performer in Cleveland and then add me (the soprano) in a smash-up, weekend-long rehearsal session. I'm working a lot lately with concepts of intimacy and community, and I wanted a situation where at least two performers were able to spend some time together developing that intimacy as an ensemble. So the instrumentation was one of geographical practicality, really. The string parts are very tightly knit, and I wrote the soprano as kind of a narrator fairy who flies in at the last minute with a new timbre.

Aside from that, there are some sick cellists in Cleveland, many of whom I've had opportunities to work with. The cellist in my soundcloud recording, Daniel Pereira, is an extremely versatile performer who brings a wonderful enthusiasm and physicality to the things he decides to invest in. Both he and Scott are, much to my delight, two spectacular performers who are able to balance technical precision with deep conceptual reflection. I knew they would have no trouble living in the conceptual world of the piece.

DB: Were there any extra-musical or conceptual ideas that informed your compositional approach?

JL: Oh my. This is always a tough question for me. I'm not what you might call a "focused" composer when it comes to concepts. I usually start with one idea, and then the more I work with the piece, the materials begin to develop a life of their own--so I go with that. And then I live my life and experience things, and they become part of the piece as well. I'm not opposed to letting a work wander off somewhere weird. I'd rather do that than hold so fast to my concept that I limit the possibility for growth somewhere else. I try to keep the idea of aesthetic unity somewhere in the back of my mind while I'm working though, so that occasionally keeps me in check.

The work's concept actually came from the way that Scott approaches his instrument. His rootedness in Feldenkrais techniques is evident in his bowing. In our work sessions, we discussed the way he connects bow strokes to breath, breath to the rest of his body, and body to the ground. I wanted to write a piece highlighting his particular sense of body awareness, where the musical materials themselves became somewhat corporeal. The piece quickly became about breath.

In my reflections on the idea of breath, I did a lot of sitting alone in the dark, listening to myself breathe, and watching shards of light peek through the blinds in my living room (*This is precisely why I've never been great at having roommates.*). And I became really obsessed with this painting by Pierre Soulages (Painting 220x336cm, 14 May 1968):

I was interested in the way that the large, connected, dark gestures in the painting point more to their foundation, the white space, as a primary material rather than to their own existence as materials. And breath, I guess, is a foundation, like the white space in the painting. Breathing isn't something that you instruct your body to do. You breathe or you pass out. It's how you exist. To isolate breathing as something more materialistic than foundational, I tried to create a setting in which my own breath was the loudest thing I could hear. So I covered my ears with my hands. There I was, sitting in the dark, hands over my ears, thinking about Pierre Soulages, and looking an awful lot like someone most people would worry about. And that became the piece! The sound that results from covering your ears and creating a pressure vacuum is a low rumble and kind of a high, barely-present hiss. Breath, in such a context, is piercing, even though it's relatively involuntary.

Timbrally speaking, the qualities of the cello and bass make them perfect to purvey the low rumble and high hiss while the high voice actually IS piercing breath. Eventually all three transform into one another. I was also inspired by the way that Soulages brings attention, not only to the final visual product of his work, but to the gestures and apparatus with which it was made--In a way, making a piece out of what's left over from his physical process--giving both the leftovers and the process equal billing. Something similar happens in breathpiece, where (1) the timbral world itself is imitating the sonic refuse of silence, and (2) certain sounds are simply the results of specific instructions for movement and breath.

What tied everything together for me was the harmonic material (not that it's extremely prominent) which I nabbed from a few bars of Tom Waits' "Ghosts of Saturday Night [After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House]" and then tweaked for my own purposes of leaving strings open, etc. It's a song from my favorite album, The Heart of Saturday Night, where the lyrics are basically a list of everything that's left over after a night of whatever there's been a night of.

And then I actually wrote the piece, and it materialized into something of its own...out of leftovers!

DB: There is an intense physicality that seems to define breathpiece, a raw, course quality that stems from the dramatic gestural content as well as the constant presence of indefinitely pitched sounds/noise. With this in mind, would you talk a bit about how you worked with the instruments (the voice included) to develop the material for the piece?

Beginning with my initial timbral idea (low rumble/high hiss/piercing breath), I set about working with Scott (via phone and various trips to Cleveland throughout the year), and Chicago cellist Russell Rolen to explore the methods they as string players might use to achieve the sounds I wanted, methods I might not have considered. In my sessions with them, I watched their movements and tried to orient them on a spectrum of intensity--intensity of bow pressure, intensity of breath, range of motion, speed, and a few other variables which I've forgotten now. And I looked for relationships between all of them and considered how I might exploit those relationships, build new ones, turn them upside-down, or morph individual techniques into one another. Underpressure of the bow on the string, for example, might seem like an un-intense technique, but it actually requires a lot of control on the part of the player and results in an unstable sound which, in the right context, can be kind of nerve-racking. Then I might ask for a double stop, where the player puts less pressure on one string and more pressure on another string, allowing one string's resonance to disappear into the other.

As I discussed in some detail above, I was definitely inspired by the idea of movement and breath as materials themselves that might result in indeterminate sounds. As a result, there are a few sections in the piece where the performers are instructed to move and breathe according to diagrams in the score, and then further instructed to listen to their own breaths in relation to each other's. As an added layer, I wanted to expand the concept of 'body awareness' established early in the piece with breath consciousness and movement instruction to 'instrument body awareness.' In the final section of breathpiece, I actually climb a stepladder to open and close chromatic gates on the bass while the player performs double stop harmonics. It's partially practical, because I actually wanted a chromatically descending passage of double stop harmonics, but it also serves as a means of relationship-morphing between instrument and performer/performer and performer.

DB: The use of the voice in conjunction with the other instruments is interesting - the voice sometimes stands out, punctuating phrases or sections, and at other times it blends seamlessly with noise sounds in the strings. Was there a particular formal strategy with regard to the voice?

JL: Practically speaking, the voice had to be its own entity. As I said above, "The string parts are very tightly knit, and I wrote the soprano as kind of a narrator fairy who flies in at the last minute with a new timbre." The high female voice in breathpiece balances and creates a nice contrast to the inherently low tessitura of the cello and bass. At the same time, the three are capable of existing in the same register and executing techniques that result in similar sonic effects...a lot of possibility for contrast and combination.

Formally, I wanted the voice to mark sections in the piece and to instigate and respond to events in the strings, and vise versa, with all three performers eventually coming together to form one instrument. Additionally, the opening vocal cadenza outlines the form--or at least the energy of the form, breaths inward and outward, strained and relaxed, are placed linearly in imitation of the way breathpiece builds up and releases tension.